Five Ways to Accelerate Your Path to Compliance

Today, virtually every organization must deal with regulatory pressure, and the burden to satisfy these demands is becoming more and more challenging.

Tactic #2: Do not ignore privileged accounts

Privileged accounts – those that grant system-level access – are THE primary sources of security breaches, and among the first places auditors look for compliance weakness. Because these accounts are all-powerful, absolutely necessary for system operation and management, and are not tied to an individual (i.e., they are most often shared across all administrators who must use them), privileged – or superuser – accounts are the primary target for the malicious activity that regulations seek to address.

Just because they’re privileged doesn’t mean they’re untouchable. Most data breaches we see are caused by insiders who exploit the privileged accounts only available to insiders. One of the most important things you can do to control access to privileged accounts is to eliminate the sharing of administrator passwords and credentials through technologies that enforce a policy-based request, approval, issuance, return, and resetting of administrative passwords.

Five Ways to Accelerate Your Path to Compliance

Privileged accounts – those that grant system-level access – are THE primary sources of security breaches, and among the first places auditors look for compliance weakness. Because these accounts are all-powerful, absolutely necessary for system operation and management, and are not tied to an individual (i.e., they are most often shared across all administrators who must use them), privileged – or superuser – accounts are the primary target for the malicious activity that regulations seek to address.

Just because they’re privileged doesn’t mean they’re untouchable. Most data breaches we see are caused by insiders who exploit the privileged accounts only available to insiders. One of the most important things you can do to control access to privileged accounts is to eliminate the sharing of administrator passwords and credentials through technologies that enforce a policy-based request, approval, issuance, return, and resetting of administrative passwords.

Compliance demands are everywhere. In the past, only banks, publicly traded companies, and those in the health care industry needed to worry about compliance. Today, virtually every organization must deal with regulatory pressure in one form or another. Whether it’s government-mandated compliance such as SOX or HIPAA, industry-enforced regulations such as PCI DSS, or self-imposed controls such as ISO 27002, the alphabet soup of applicable regulations is growing, and the burden to satisfy these demands is becoming more and more challenging.

The logical reaction is to seek a line-by-line assessment of compliance (or non-compliance), often involving an auditor digging for a violation. If a violation is found, the organization is left scrambling to find a way to remediate the violation. Compliance doesn’t have to be complex or reactive. Quest Software’s Tim Sedlack and Todd Peterson suggest five simple tactics that – if followed – can dramatically improve an organization’s chances of passing its next compliance audit.

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